Predictions What to Expect in 2016

Look for breakthroughs, comebacks and new solutions to familiar problems: 17 prominent thinkers on the big developments that they anticipate or hope for

Ferdinand Mount on America’s Populist Moment

Photo: Steven Senne/Associated Press

Ferdinand Mount on America’s Populist Moment

Populist movements have come and gone in politics, usually foundering on party splits

The rise of the Trumpery Tendency bears more than a passing resemblance to the rise of the Know-Nothing Party in the 1840s and ’50s. The Native American Party, as it laughably called itself, was born out of fears that the country was being overrun by Catholic immigrants from Germany and Italy, whose first loyalty was supposedly to the pope, not to the Constitution of the U.S.

At their peak, the Know-Nothings elected mayors in Chicago, San Francisco and Washington, D.C., and swept the state of Massachusetts. Donald Trump’s call to ban Muslims from the U.S. and Republican resistance to President Barack Obama’s plan to resettle thousands of Syrian refugees in the U.S. suggest that a similar resentment still has plenty of political mileage (though no real votes are in yet).

Does the tendency have legs? Populist movements have come and gone in American politics. They have usually foundered on party splits (the Know-Nothings were hopelessly divided on slavery) and were ultimately washed away by public ridicule. They have also been eroded by demographic factors. To win in the big cities, the Know-Nothings soon began to need the support of those German- and Irish-American blue-collar workers. Today, anti-immigrant rhetoric that sounds too menacing risks alienating the emergent Latino middle class.
Almost every country in the European Union is seeing the rise of populist parties that are disenchanted with Brussels and want to reclaim national independence, with the aim first and foremost of closing their borders, if necessary by building fences.

n Central Europe, those fences are going up at a dazzling pace. The U.K. has managed to squeeze the flow of illegal immigrants through the Channel Tunnel down to a trickle. On its border with Mexico, the U.S. is well ahead of the game. The political reality is that almost everywhere the existing government is already responding to the populist clamor. The huddled masses yearning to breathe free may have to hold their breath, or at least form an orderly queue.

But the biggest test awaiting the new American president is whether a more proactive and generous foreign policy can bring some sort of stability to the failed states in the Middle East and elsewhere that are fueling this desperate tide. The ultimate answer to populist resentment may lie in resurrecting the spirit of Gen. George C. Marshall rather than in blowing louder than Donald J. Trump.

Mr. Mount was head of the Downing Street Policy Unit under Margaret Thatcher and editor of the Times Literary Supplement.

Walter Russell Mead on the Fall of Islamic State

Photo: Dabiq/Planet Pix/Zuma Press

Walter Russell Mead on the Fall of Islamic State

The U.S. needs to start thinking about what to do once it figures out how to defeat the Sunni jihadist group

The last two years were full of surprises in the Middle East, most of them unpleasant, and 2016 looks to be no different. The combination of sectarian war among Sunnis and Shiites, Russian intervention on the side of Syria’s Assad regime, geopolitical competition between Saudi Arabia and Iran and growing economic stress brought about by the low price of oil will make for a difficult year—both on the ground and for the Washington policy makers looking for a way forward.

We must hope that the president will recognize that the growing power of Iran is the key factor destabilizing the region and start to address Sunni fears about a perceived U.S. tilt toward Iran. Failing that, American foreign policy is likely to be torn between two opponents in the Middle East: a Russia-Shiite axis linking Iran, Syria and Iraq with Moscow, and a set of radical Sunni jihadist movements.

The question will be what happens to the remaining relatively stable Sunni governments in the region: the Saudis and the Gulf states, Egypt, Algeria, Tunisia, Turkey and Jordan. Distrustful of their longtime American protector, frightened by the specter of Iranian and Russian power, challenged by the rise of Sunni jihadist movements, these states also face difficult economic times. Oil prices are low, tourism is moribund, and the regional economy has been disrupted by the worst violence and refugee crisis in decades.

Islamic State may not benefit as much from this chaos as it hopes, as its loss this week of the Iraqi city of Ramadi suggests. The coalition of forces against Islamic State is strong, and it is harder to fight a conventional war than to carry on guerrilla resistance. So we should already be thinking about the endgame: What does the world propose to do with the legions of fanatical rapists, murderers and looters now fighting under the black flag of Islamic State? Who will eventually govern the territories it now controls? It is not too soon to plan for the defeat of Islamic State; otherwise, its fall could be as destabilizing as its rise.

Mr. Mead is a professor of foreign affairs and humanities at Bard College and a scholar at the Hudson Institute.

Steven Pinker on New Advances in Behavioral Genetics

Steven Pinker on New Advances in Behavioral Genetics

The findings of behavioral genetics have turned out to be substantial and robust, and new studies are linking genes with behavioral traits like IQ

Behavioral genetics, the study of why people differ, has long been the most vilified subfield of psychology. Its signature findings—that all traits are partly heritable and that the variation that can’t be attributed to genes can’t be attributed to families either—are regularly denied by commentators who consider them too fatalistic.

Yet it is just these results that have escaped the replicability crisis embroiling behavioral science, in which many highly publicized findings have turned out to be flukes. Unlike the cute but ephemeral journalist bait that comes out of many psychology labs, the findings of behavioral genetics have turned out to be substantial and robust.

Indeed, the heritability of intelligence has recently been corroborated by a new method which complements the classic studies of twins and adoptees and which solves an outstanding puzzle: Where are the genes? Most of the “Gene for X” claims of the 1990s turned out to be false positives that resulted from snooping around genomes in paltry samples. The discrepancy between the robust results from classic family research and the failures of the gene-hunters is called the Mystery of the Missing Heritability.

But new studies looking for small effects of thousands of genes in large samples have pinpointed a few genetic loci that each accounts for a fraction of an IQ point. More studies are in the pipeline and will link those genes to brain development, showing that they are not statistical curiosities. The emerging picture is that most behavioral traits are affected by many, many genes, each accounting for a tiny percentage of the variance.

Biologists are solving a related mystery: What is the additional factor shaping us that cannot be identified with our genes or families? The answer may be luck. We’ve long known that the genome can’t wire the brain down to the last synapse, so there is tremendous room for unpredictable zigzags in development.

Random accidents also shape the genome itself. Each of us inherits about 60 new mutations, and as we live our lives, our neurons fill up with still more mutations, which can affect how our brains work. We are all mutants, so our genes may have an even bigger role in shaping us and our children than we thought: not just the ones we inherited from our ancestors but the ones that we mangled ourselves.

Mr. Pinker is Johnstone Professor of Psychology at Harvard and the author of “The Blank Slate” and “The Better Angels of Our Nature.”

Walter Isaacson on the Coming Wave of Fintech

Walter Isaacson on the Coming Wave of Fintech

There’s been a lot of hype about a coming wave of fintech, but up until now the financial services industry has been relatively undisrupted by technology. That will change this year thanks to what could be one of the next transformative innovations: the spread of distributed-ledger technologies akin to the blockchain, the public database of transactions that undergirds bitcoin.

Bitcoin is a little too geeky and mysterious for mass adoption, but we’re about to see the explosion of commercial services based on its underlying concept. The Holy Grail is to enable instant, secure transactions. Some could be small. I’ve long been hoping for a simple digital coin purse that could be used to pay a dime or a dollar for songs, articles, videos and any other content online generated by creative individuals or big media companies. Likewise, the time is ripe for the next iteration of services like Venmo that would allow me to zap money instantly to other people.

But distributed-ledger technologies could also transform the world of large transactions. In its simplest form, the blockchain is simply a method for having a shared and reliable database for the exchange of assets. With bitcoin the transactions are anonymous. But large banks as well as fledgling startups are experimenting with private blockchains that are more transparent and require permission, authentication and identity verification.

That might seem to defeat the original purpose of bitcoin, which enshrined anonymity, but it would be useful for us ordinary folks who simply want to have verified, safe and authenticated real-time transactions with our bank, broker or insurance company. Distributed ledgers would also reduce costs for these institutions, which is why I suspect they will embrace these systems.
There will always be a place for the original bitcoin, but there is also a need for less mysterious services based on the blockchain and other distributed-ledger protocols. At their best (though this is too much to hope for in 2016), these technologies could even begin to mitigate some of the cybersecurity problems plaguing the Internet.

Mr. Isaacson, the CEO of the Aspen Institute, is the author of “The Innovators” and biographies of Benjamin Franklin, Albert Einstein and Steve Jobs.

Jeffrey D. Sachs on How to Forge a Grand Bargain on Energy

Photo: Jeff Fusco/Getty Images

Jeffrey D. Sachs on How to Forge a Grand Bargain on Energy

There’s a role for fossil fuels, nuclear and renewables

The wars over climate science aren’t really about whether humanity is dangerously changing the climate. It is. They are proxy wars—lobbying wars—over 21st-century energy sources: fossil fuels vs. renewables vs. nuclear energy. In fact, we will need all energy sources that meet three conditions: homegrown (for national security), low-cost (for competitiveness) and environmentally safe. With improved technologies, there is a place for fossil fuels, renewables and nuclear in the mix.

Fossil fuels can continue to be used safely to the extent that their carbon-dioxide emissions are captured and stored underground. The new Boundary Dam coal-fired power plant in the Canadian province of Saskatchewan suggests that the costs of carbon capture and storage can be reasonably low and that they will decline along a future learning curve.

Nuclear energy can continue to be used safely with improvements in nuclear technology. One promising possibility is the integral fast reactor technology that uses its own nuclear wastes as energy inputs in a closed fuel cycle. Such reactors also have passive safety features that would be safer in case of a shutdown.

Renewables, including solar and wind, are falling in cost and expanding in application. Renewables may not only power the future grid and electric-vehicle fleet with zero-emission power but also be used to produce synthetic fuels. If Elon Musk can bring a re-entry rocket back to Earth in a perfect upright landing, as he’s just done, he can also dramatically improve batteries for his Tesla dream machines and the grid.

The U.S. tech giants—Google, Apple, Microsoft, GE, Tesla and others—are already on the case. Business associations for advanced energy systems are reaching out across parties. I predict a political tipping point soon in which leaders of both U.S. political parties will move beyond the sterile defense of one energy source vs. the others, and instead embrace homegrown, low-cost and low-emission energy from fossil fuels, renewables and nuclear power.

Prof. Sachs is the director of Columbia University’s Earth Institute and the author of “The Age of Sustainable Development.”

Ann Patchett on the Return of Bookstores

Ann Patchett on the Return of Bookstores

Despite Amazon and e-readers, customers are embracing their community stores

When Karen Hayes and I opened Parnassus Books in Nashville a little over four years ago, I repeatedly said that we were part of a trend. The small independent bookstore, long ago beaten down by Borders and Barnes & Noble, then repeatedly kicked by Amazon, was rising up from the ashes. People were tired of pointing and clicking. People were tired of screens in general. They no longer wanted one store that promised them everything but instead were longing for a store that sold good books, had a staff of smart readers, a thriving children’s section and maybe a couple of shop dogs. That is what we were offering.

I don’t know if I’m prophetic or just lucky, but what was at the time not much more than wishful thinking has turned out to be true. New stores are opening; old stores are branching out into new locations. In Nashville, we’re not only doubling our size in 2016, we’ve bought a mobile book van. Booksellers are, generally speaking, a cautious group when it comes to voicing optimism, but I sense a cultural shift coming on: Books and bookstores and reading are the wave of the future.

I don’t credit the booksellers for this change. In my extensive experience with booksellers, they’ve always been a hardworking, innovative bunch of passionate readers w ho were in this business for love. I credit the customers, who seem to be collectively waking up to the fact that they are in charge of what businesses fail and succeed based on where they spend their money. If you like your bookstore and want it to stay in your community, then you have to buy your books there, in the same way you must buy your hammer from the guy at the hardware store who always gives you good advice.

I also credit the authors who keep people passionate about reading. This is going to be a fabulous year for books. In 2016, Elizabeth Strout has her best novel yet coming out, “My Name Is Lucy Barton,” and I can’t wait to sell the late Paul Kalanithi’s gorgeous “When Breath Becomes Air,” and just when you think Louise Erdrich can’t get any better, she goes and writes “LaRose.” Go to your local independent bookstore this year and buy a copy. You’ll be part of the trend.

Yuval Levin on Escaping the Immigration Stalemate

Yuval Levin on Escaping the Immigration Stalemate

Give up on ‘comprehensive’ reform and focus on incremental compromises that serve U.S. national interests

Like any presidential election year, 2016 isn’t likely to see many policy breakthroughs. But it may be the year when we finally come to terms with the disastrous futility of the crusade for “comprehensive” immigration reform.

For more than a decade, policy makers have disdained targeted reforms of particular elements of immigration policy. Instead, advocates have sought to consolidate major expansions in all forms of immigration into one massive package, in the hope that it would attract a coalition broad enough—reaching from the Chamber of Commerce to agricultural employers to Google to La Raza to the ACLU—to roll over opposition to any particular expansion and thereby avoid the need to compromise. About all that immigration critics have been offered is the enforcement of existing laws.

This has turned the debate into an all-or-nothing fight, encouraging the parties to the argument to exhibit the most extreme versions of themselves. Thus the familiar media spectacle of fearful xenophobia squaring off against self-loathing post-Americanism—even though very few Americans of any political persuasion answer to either description. This comprehensive approach has now been tried unsuccessfully under presidents and congresses of both parties. As the current presidential campaign suggests, Republicans in particular are unlikely to try it again.

Instead, we can hope for targeted efforts to address specific challenges and needs. This new approach could recognize, for instance, that there is now a much stronger case for more high-skilled immigration than for more low-skilled immigration (for reasons of integration, fiscal prudence and pressures in the labor market). It could acknowledge that the current policy on family reunification is too broad. It could seek a real compromise on the status of people who entered the country illegally but have long resided here—perhaps through legalization short of citizenship.

The goal should be incremental compromises that make our immigration policy more coherently serve national interests—more restrictive in some respects, more open in others. It won’t all happen this year, but grasping the futility of the comprehensive approach would be a start.

Mr. Levin is the editor of National Affairs and a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center.

Frank Wilczek on Spotting Tremors in Space-Time

Frank Wilczek on Spotting Tremors in Space-Time

Through gravitational waves, physicists may soon be able to monitor some of the universe’s most violent, dramatic events

In the year to come, plausibly, but almost certainly within the next few years, physicists will detect tremors in space-time—or, to use the scientific term, gravitational waves. Through gravitational waves we will be able, for the first time, to monitor some of the most violent, dramatic events the universe has to offer.

My prediction is inspired by an extraordinary instrument, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory, or LIGO, which is operated by Caltech and MIT. LIGO is designed to detect extremely tiny changes in the distances between a few pairs of mirrors. The numbers are mind-boggling. The mirrors are four kilometers apart, and the distances between them are expected to change by less than one thousandth of the diameter of a proton. All kinds of things can jiggle mirrors, but gravitational waves produce a unique pattern of changes, so their signal can emerge from the noise.

It is poetic that this first observation of gravitational waves will coincide with the centenary of Einstein’s prediction that they exist. They’re a logical consequence of his general theory of relativity. According to general relativity, space and time aren’t rigid structures but form a kind of elastic medium—a ubiquitous cosmic Jell-O. Massive bodies cause stress in space-time, and the distortion they produce affects the motion of other bodies. This is how general relativity accounts for gravity.

But Einstein carried his reasoning a major step further. As massive bodies move, space-time tries to dance to their tune. But the cosmic Jell-O has inertia, so it can’t follow rapid motions perfectly. Some of its distortions break free, take on a life of their own and spread at the speed of light. This is the origin of gravitational waves.

Space-time Jell-O is far stiffer than steel, so it takes enormous forces to produce significant tremors. (Memo to wormhole and time-­travel fans: Bending space-­time is hard.) Even with LIGO, we can only hope to observe gravitational waves produced by extremely massive bodies in extremely rapid motion. These waves signal spectacular events, like the death throes of binary systems involving white dwarfs, neutron stars or black holes.

LIGO eventually should be able to detect pulses that emerge from such catastrophes anywhere within our local group of galaxies. No doubt we’ll discover, once again, that the universe is a strange place.

Dr. Wilczek, winner of the 2004 Nobel Prize in Physics, is a professor of physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His most recent book is “A Beautiful Question: Finding Nature’s Deep Design.”

Nassim Nicholas Taleb on the Real Financial Risks of 2016

Nassim Nicholas Taleb on the Real Financial Risks of 2016

Worry less about the banking system, but commodities, epidemics and climate volatility could be trouble

How should we think about financial risks in 2016?

First, worry less about the banking system. Financial institutions today are less fragile than they were a few years ago. This isn’t because they got better at understanding risk (they didn’t) but because, since 2009, banks have been shedding their exposures to extreme events. Hedge funds, which are much more adept at risk-taking, now function as reinsurers of sorts. Because hedge-fund owners have skin in the game, they are less prone to hiding risks than are bankers.

This isn’t to say that the financial system has healed: Monetary policy made itself ineffective with low interest rates, which were seen as a cure rather than a transitory painkiller. Zero interest rates turn monetary policy into a massive weapon that has no ammunition. There’s no evidence that “zero” interest rates are better than, say, 2% or 3%, as the Federal Reserve may be realizing.

I worry about asset values that have swelled in response to easy money. Low interest rates invite speculation in assets such as junk bonds, real estate and emerging market securities. The effect of tightening in 1994 was disproportionately felt with Italian, Mexican and Thai securities. The rule is: Investments with micro-Ponzi attributes (i.e., a need to borrow to repay) will be hit.

Though “another Lehman Brothers” isn’t likely to happen with banks, it is very likely to happen with commodity firms and countries that depend directly or indirectly on commodity prices. Dubai is more threatened by oil prices than Islamic State. Commodity people have been shouting, “We’ve hit bottom,” which leads me to believe that they still have inventory to liquidate. Long-term agricultural commodity prices might be threatened by improvement in the storage of solar energy, which could prompt some governments to cancel ethanol programs as a mandatory use of land for “clean” energy.

We also need to focus on risks in the physical world. Terrorism is a problem we’re managing, but epidemics such as Ebola are patently not. The most worrisome fact of 2015 was the reaction to the threat of Ebola, with the media confusing a multiplicative disease with an ordinary one and shaming people for overreacting. Cancer rates cannot quadruple from one month to the next; epidemics can. We are clearly unprepared to deal with such threats.

Finally, climate volatility will produce some nonlinear effects, and these will be compounded in our interconnected world, in which disruptions are more acute. The East Coast blackout of August 2003 was nothing compared with what may come.

Mr. Taleb, a former trader and professor, is the author of the four-volume “Incerto.”

Amartya Sen on Lifting Up the World's Women

Photo: Shuji Kajiyama/Associated Press

Amartya Sen on Lifting Up the World's Women

Women’s empowerment is an urgent need in the developing world and an ongoing struggle in developed countries

One priority for the new year should be reducing the persistent inequality between women and men, which is a pervasive feature of the world. Gender inequality takes many different forms, varying from the crudely biological in some regions, with nutritional and medical neglect of girls compared with boys, to the systematic undervaluation of women’s intellectual and creative potential, even in very advanced countries.

Universal education of women is certainly needed in any country that does not yet have it (and there are many such still). There is clear evidence that women’s empowerment through greater schooling—along with recognized and remunerated employment—increases the independence of women. This has played a big part in reining in high fertility rates across the world. For example, even though credit for China’s fertility reduction is often given to its draconian one-child policy introduced in the late 1970s, most of the fall can be statistically related to women’s schooling and female employment.

Still, formal education has not removed the “boy preference” in China, where selective abortion of female fetuses is extremely high—higher than in India and much higher than in Bangladesh, where this type of bias is nearly absent and seems to be socially resented. Public discussion about the place and dignity of women has a major role in supplementing what formal schooling alone can achieve.

At the other end of the developmental ladder, Japan has long focused on women’s education, and nearly half its graduating university students are women. Japanese girls even tend to do better in school in science than boys. But only around 7% of the senior managerial positions in Japan are occupied by women. To remedy this there is a need for much more public discussion—and perhaps also more politicization, in the broadest sense. That too is a kind of education.

Mr. Sen, the winner of the 1998 Nobel Prize in Economics, is Thomas W. Lamont University Professor at Harvard University and the author of “Development as Freedom” and “The Idea of Justice.”

Orville Schell on a Bright Spot in U.S.-China Relations

Orville Schell on a Bright Spot in U.S.-China Relations

Climate change offers a classic opportunity—a common foe that could bring a new and much needed stability to Sino-U.S. relations

The level of mistrust between Washington and Beijing is very high these days. Disagreements have multiplied in recent years, with the U.S. resisting China’s gambits in the South and East China seas, disapproving of President Xi Jinping’s courtship of Russian President Vladimir Putin and warily eyeing other efforts to project Chinese economic and military power. And there remains the enormous disparity between the two countries’ political systems and values, exemplified by Beijing’s recent arrests of lawyers, stifling of NGOs, harassment of artists and intellectuals, censorship of the media and hacking of U.S. databases.

Beijing, too, has questions about U.S. intentions: Is our “pivot to Asia” not aimed at containing China? Do we still believe in regime change? What do all the belligerent utterances issuing from the Republican primary portend?

There is one potentially bright spot in this fraught tableau, a place where both national interests are aligned: climate change. Indeed, Presidents Obama and Xi have already begun weaving together an effective fabric of common purpose that helped the recent U.N. climate conference succeed in Paris last month.

For this partnership to become a real game-changer, far more courageous leadership is needed, especially as the U.S. continues, as it should, to hedge its bets against the possibility of a more adversarial relationship. The task for the U.S. is to persuade Chinese leaders that, even as we actively counter their overreach, we far prefer a peaceable and collaborative path forward.

Climate change offers a classic opportunity—exactly the kind of common foe that, despite years of hostility, brought Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger together with Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai in 1972 to counter the Soviet Union. Climate change provides another such opening, and both sides should exploit it by appointing special ambassadors and initiating an active round of shuttle diplomacy. A success would not only help to confront global warming but could also bring a new and much needed stability to Sino-U.S. relations.

Mr. Schell is Arthur Ross Director of the Center on U.S.-China Relations at the Asia Society and co-author, with John Delury, of “Wealth and Power: China’s Long March to the 21st Century.”

Margaret MacMillan on the Hard Work of Keeping the Peace

Margaret MacMillan on the Hard Work of Keeping the Peace

Like our forebears, we must reinvest in the institutions that strengthen our societies—and resist the Pied Pipers of division

So often we human beings behave like adolescents, grumbling about our parents, storming out of the house and believing firmly that we will do a lot better than they did. Perhaps 2016 will be the year we realize that the generations before us actually possessed quite a lot of wisdom—a wisdom won painfully through the Depression, two world wars and a protracted Cold War.

Our predecessors wanted to prevent such catastrophes from occurring again. Above all, they felt they had a responsibility to future generations. At home, they invested in infrastructure and education, built institutions to strengthen their societies and did their best to help their less fortunate fellow citizens. Abroad, they thought, as they had to, of how best to protect their own nations and saw stronger international institutions as an essential part of doing so.

As memories faded over the years—of bread lines, destroyed cities, genocide, Soviet-style dictatorships, the terrifying prospect of nuclear war—we took for granted that we could have stability and peace without bothering to think much about them or invest in their maintenance.

The past few years have been a rude awakening. We worry that our schools aren’t giving our young a decent education. From Iraq to Somalia, we have seen how easily societies can be destroyed and how difficult it is to rebuild them. We see daily what happens when millions of desperate people are on the move looking for safety and better lives. The unpredictable, aggressive forays of Vladimir Putin or Kim Jong Un make us ask what will happen if they are not contained. Even in stable democracies, we have a worrying number of people who think that most politicians are self-seeking and corrupt—and who will give their allegiance to a motley crew of Pied Pipers who skip about with no clear road in sight.

Though 2016 isn’t going to usher in a new golden age, it may be the year when we grow up and take responsibility for our own societies—and the planet too. The outpouring of grass-roots support for Syrian refugees, the success of the Paris summit on climate change, the refusal of the people of Paris to give way to fear, the election of middle-of-the-road governments in several countries (including my own Canada): All these are encouraging signs that we are remembering what Lincoln called the better angels of our nature.

Prof. MacMillan is the warden of St. Antony’s College at the University of Oxford and the author of “The War That Ended Peace.”

Dambisa Moyo on Escaping the Doldrums of Global Growth

Dambisa Moyo on Escaping the Doldrums of Global Growth

To fix the current global economic malaise, we need pragmatic ideas that combine elements from both the left and right

Economic forecasts for developing countries, where nearly 90% of the world’s people live, are languishing far below the 7% annual growth rate required to double per capita incomes in one generation and thus meaningfully improve living standards. The largest emerging economies—countries with populations greater than 50 million, such as Russia, South Africa and Brazil—are growing a lethargic 1% to 2% a year, and some are even regressing.

Meanwhile, the world’s leading economies remain plagued by unsustainable public debts and deficits, the eroding quality and quantity of their labor forces, and sluggish productivity growth, all of which are dragging down the prospects for growth.

Any credible effort to remedy the current global economic malaise requires policy makers to evolve beyond ideological left-right approaches and move toward more pragmatic stances that combine elements from all camps.

One promising idea, from the right, is to embed incentives—the bedrock of market capitalism—into social programs. Transfer programs that condition the receipt of monetary rewards on attaining certain outcomes can incentivize people to do things that benefit society as a whole. Payments to parents, for instance, can be linked to ensuring that their children attend school or get immunized. Such “pay for performance” interventions have already enjoyed noteworthy success in Mexico, Brazil and even in pilot programs in New York City.

From the left come interesting possibilities for blurring the lines between public and private. On this view, government’s role can be more expansive, intervening in the allocation of capital and labor and not leaving such matters entirely to the private sector. China’s success with state capitalism suggests that other states also might want to try broader economic engagement beyond providing classic public goods like roads and defense. As for private initiative, the corporate sector continues to assume a greater role in addressing social challenges such as education and health care and might usefully extend its efforts to infrastructure and other public needs.

Only a policy mix that sets aside familiar ideological dogmas can drive the long-term investments needed to turn us from the perilous path of negligible global growth.

Dr. Moyo’s most recent book is “Winner Take All: China’s Race for Resources and What It Means for the World.”

Christopher Caldwell on the Staying Power of Merkel and Hollande

Christopher Caldwell on the Staying Power of Merkel and Hollande

Despite crises from terrorism and migration, the leaders of Germany and France will probably hold on until their 2017 elections

A wave of terrorism in France, a (tidal) wave of immigration in Germany—serious challenges face the two countries at the core of the project to build a European Union. It is tempting to assume that the governments of François Hollande and Angela Merkel cannot survive until their respective elections in 2017. But they can. Barring some kind of popular revolt, they probably will.

Mr. Hollande’s post-massacre reprieve from his abysmal unpopularity will prove brief. He must choose between looking strong on terrorism and pleasing the multiculturalists who dominate his party. They are already up in arms over his plans to strip French nationality from dual citizens waging jihad.

Europe’s establishment parties—“people’s parties,” as they used to be called—have been losing public support for two decades. As a result, they now collude rather than compete. This is a long-term weakness (for countries) but a short-term strength (for politicians).

Ms. Merkel runs a “grand coalition” of Germany’s two largest parties, the Socialists and her own Christian Democrats, which have banded together against a public weary of the EU, its regulations and its currency. Such governments are increasingly common in Europe. The Netherlands has one. Spain seems destined for one since its conservatives emerged from December elections needing left-of-center votes to rule. France will get there eventually. In December, Mr. Hollande’s Socialists withdrew from regional election runoffs to shore up Nicolas Sarkozy’s Republicans against the insurgent National Front.

As U.S. elections approach, might Europe’s establishmentarian leaders see an antiestablishment Republican victory as grounds for a rupture? No way. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, Europe’s major powers have been cannibalizing their military budgets to pay for other government services. Without NATO, Europe is defenseless—a development of considerable relevance to its present crises.

Mr. Caldwell is a senior editor at the Weekly Standard and the author of “Reflections on the Revolution in Europe.”

Michael Roth on Liberal Education's Comeback

Michael Roth on Liberal Education's Comeback

Wesleyan’s president argues that 2016 should be the year we resist efforts to steer higher education toward pseudo-practicality

After a decade in which broad, conceptual learning was often bashed, 2016 will see a resurgent commitment in higher education to a pragmatic liberal-arts education. Not only traditional classrooms but also new pedagogical tools like MOOCs (massive open online courses) will be used more extensively to teach everything from Great Books to transformational historical trends to landmarks of scientific thinking. In 2016, liberal education, American-style, will flourish.

Many liberal-arts colleges have been under extraordinary duress in recent years, while many big public universities, when not just focused on specialized research, seem to have abandoned broad, contextual learning in favor of vocational majors, TV-friendly athletics and cultivating a party atmosphere for millennial customers and their hovering parents.

But liberal education in America has been under pressure before, and this is one of those moments when it can emerge stronger than ever. The stakes in 2016 are high, from a national political debate desperate for critical thinking to an economy eager for innovation. This should be the year we find the courage to resist those who want to steer higher education in the direction of a pseudo-practicality. A strictly utilitarian education produces graduates who will conform to the status quo, but in our period of extraordinary change, the status quo almost immediately becomes obsolete.

Liberal-arts education today can be pragmatic, empowering students with potent ways of dealing with the issues they will face at work and in life. In the years ahead, liberal learning will link engineering with design and economics, the arts with computer science, the study of philosophy with building more just institutions.
From Thomas Jefferson to W.E.B. Du Bois to Jane Addams, Americans have recognized that a broad, contextual education protects against mindless tyranny and haughty privilege. In 2016, we can recognize again that liberal learning in the American tradition isn’t only training; it is an invitation to think for oneself—and to act in concert with others to face serious challenges and create far-reaching opportunities.

Dr. Roth is the president of Wesleyan University and the author of “Beyond the University: Why Liberal Education Matters.”

Glenn Hubbard on the Economic Debate We’re Not Having

Glenn Hubbard on the Economic Debate We’re Not Having

What’s missing in today’s presidential race is a discussion about economic priorities in relation to the sort of future we wish to have

The debate about the economy in the current presidential race is notable mostly for how backward-looking it is. Bernie Sanders gives us a pining fantasy of a European welfare state, while Hillary Clinton speaks of a grab bag of small changes for the middle class. Donald Trump offers up angry declarations against free trade and smart immigration—both of them long-standing pillars of conservative economic policy. As for the more traditional Republicans in the race, several have emphasized pro-growth themes (especially Jeb Bush, whom I advise), but this unconventional election season has drawn their attention elsewhere.

What’s missing is the big question of how to think about economic priorities in relation to the sort of future we wish to have. The federal budget of the not-so-distant future will be dominated by interest payments on the debt and by entitlement spending. As a result, we will have to invest less in defense, education, training, research and infrastructure—the sort of public goods that a future-oriented society needs. Such investments not only raise gross domestic product and incomes; they help to ensure that prosperity is widely shared and that American society continues to reward work and innovation.

The peril of policies so anchored in the past is visible today in the economic struggles of Europe, where both growth and inclusion have fallen off dramatically. In many European economies, high social spending and debt service have limited not just economic growth but spending in crucial areas like defense and support for work and training. Those lucky enough to have protected jobs are increasingly confronted by have-nots—largely younger workers battling for a place at the economic table.

To avoid this fate in the U.S., we must find a way forward that avoids both the politics of resentment and an unaffordable welfare state. The silver lining in the success of today’s antiestablishment candidates, on the left and the right, may be that we will finally shift to the sort of debate we need to have, about escaping the destructive economic legacies of the past and creating real economic opportunity for the future.

Mr. Hubbard, the dean of Columbia Business School, was chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers under President George W. Bush.

Freeman Dyson on the Science of Being Human

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Freeman Dyson on the Science of Being Human

A new science of human qualities could explain how a few small chemical changes in the genome produced profound changes in our ancestors

About 10 years ago, the geneticist David Haussler found a remarkable mystery in the human genome. He compared the genomes of various animal species, including chicken, mouse, chimp and human, looking for stretches of DNA that appear unchanged in all the nonhuman species but are substantially different in the human. He found two such stretches which he called HAR1 and HAR2, the letters HAR standing for Human Accelerated Region. Because these stretches of DNA were unchanged in the nonhuman species during the roughly 300 million years of evolution from the common ancestor of birds and mammals to the present, they must have had some essential functions that were the same in all these species. Because they changed substantially in the human species during the six million years of evolution from the common ancestor of chimps and humans to modern humans, they must have acquired different essential functions in humans.

Dr. Haussler discovered two facts about HAR1 and HAR2. First, he found out when they are active in the genomes of mice. They are active during the middle phase of embryonic development, when the main structures of the growing embryo are put in place. In humans, this period of activity would be the middle trimester of pregnancy. Second, he found out where they are active in mice. HAR1 is active in the growing cortex of the embryonic brain, while HAR2 is active in the growing structures of the embryonic front paw. In humans, the smooth cortex of the mouse becomes elaborately folded, and the front paw of the mouse becomes the hand. These facts agree with our expectations, that the crucial differences between human and nonhuman species should arise in the genetic programming of the brain and the hand.

I am hoping that the detailed study of the molecular structure and function of HAR1 and HAR2 in humans and nonhumans will give birth to a new science of human qualities, explaining how a few small chemical changes in the genome could have produced profound changes in the mental capabilities of our ancestors. At the same time, we might be midwives to the birth of a second new science, the study of the architecture of the genome, leading toward a complete decipherment of the language in which nature writes our genetic destiny.

Mr. Dyson is a retired professor of physics at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J. His many books include, most recently, “Birds and Frogs’’ and “Dreams of Earth and Sky.”